Why bother?

• Animations are a useful communication and educational tool
• With the power of R, we can create them without learning an additional software

What do I need?

1. the animate package by Yihui Xie and friends

install.packages("animation")

2. External tools: Imagemagick, GraphicsMagick, LyX, PDFLaTeX, SWF, FFmpeg

• To install ImageMagick at the terminal use homebrew

brew install imagemagick

What final format will my animation be in?

• GIF
• HTML
• LaTeX
• SWF (shockwave)
• mp4 (video)

In general, unless you plan to transport your final animation, use HTML

A simple example

Consider a static plot

A simple example

Write a for loop

library(animation)
saveHTML({
    for (i in 1:10) plot(runif(10), ylim = 0:1)
})

More examples

• An educational example using base plot graphics.
• A ggplot example

Possible issues

• Limit of source graphs for certain formats (Some users report a limit of ~500 graphs for GIF and HTML)
• saveHTML is the most flexible format
• Installation issues may arise with the external tools. Persevere and stackoverflow.

References

Animate Package References

• The associated website for this package: http://vis.supstat.com
• Yihui Xie and Xiaoyue Cheng. animation: A package for statistical animations. R News, 8(2):23– 27, October 2008. URL: http://CRAN.R-project.org/doc/Rnews/Rnews_2008-2.pdf (NB: some functions mentioned in the above article have been slightly modified; see the help pages for the up-to-date usage.)
• Yihui Xie (2013). animation: An R Package for Creating Animations and Demonstrating Statistical Methods. Journal of Statistical Software, 53(1), 1-27. URL http://www.jstatsoft.org/v53/ i01/.

References

Tutorials

• http://www.programmingr.com/content/animations-r/
• https://www.r-bloggers.com/animations-in-r/
• http://using-r-project.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/no-success-yet-then-more-animations.html

Thank you

• Slides are online at http://rpubs.com/rachwhatsit/animated-plots